A 19-year-old African American woman is dead for the “crime” of asking for help after a car accident in a predominantly white suburb of Detroit.

Renisha McBride was shot in the head with a shotgun in the early morning hours of November 2. She had been in a car crash and—with her cell phone dead and bleeding from a wound on her head—was seeking help from residents.

According to reports, 54-year-old Theodore Wafer shot Renisha through the screen door of his home. Wafer didn’t call police until an hour later—at which point, he claimed to have fired in self-defense. He then changed his story, claiming the shotgun went off by accident—only to change it back again when prosecutors filed murder and manslaughter charges against him.

Renisha’s murder is being compared to the Trayvon Martin case, and for good reason—Wafer is using “Stand Your Ground”-style self-defense laws to try to escape punishment by claiming that he felt threatened by Renisha.

Although her death was ruled a homicide, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy didn’t file charges for 13 days, during which time police and the mainstream media kept the killer’s identity secret. Worthy reportedly refused an initial request for a warrant by Dearborn Heights police, saying more investigation was needed.

Detroiters didn’t take the same do-nothing attitude toward Renisha’s murder.

Two days later, some 200 people attended a rally, organized by the National Action Network, on the West Side of Detroit. Another protest was held a week later, on December 16, organized by the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and the International Socialist Organization.

Faced with this mounting pressure, Worthy finally filed charges against Wafer, including second-degree murder and manslaughter.

Now that charges have been filed against Wafer, the media are taking another page out of the Trayvon Martin case and are putting the victim on trial. Mainstream outlets are reporting on toxicology reports showing that the alcohol level in Ranisha’s blood was past the legal limit for intoxication—and unconfirmed tests showing marijuana in her system. As if that justifies her execution by shotgun for seeking help.

Worthy insisted that the decision to charge Wafer had “nothing whatsoever to do with the race of the parties”—but no one who looks at the case can take that seriously. As journalist Rania Khalek wrote at her blog, Renisha was “a Black woman from Detroit, which is 82 percent Black, whereas Dearborn Heights, the area she was shot in, is 86 percent white.”

Anyone who has protest police violence and racism in Detroit is familiar with the double standards applied to Black and white, including by Kym Worthy, who is African American.

The prosecutor assigned to Jones’ case is the very same one as for his daughter’s killer,which Worthy denies is a conflict of interest. In the case of Aiyana’s killer, the prosecutor’s office somehow managed to select an all-white jury from a predominantly Black area for the cop’s first trial, which ended in a mistrial.

It goes without saying that a Black man who killed a white woman on his porch would be put in jail right away. The news media wouldn’t be printing statements from his neighbors about how he’s a “good man” who “never bothered anybody.” Wafer wouldn’t have been released on 10 percent of a $250,000 bond and described as a “low risk to the community”—and the media wouldn’t be talking about whether he reasonably believed his life was in danger.